The ongoing list of scam-attempts, hacks, thefts, and inside-jobs, though, is part of the daily life -both entertaining and hair-raising.

Decentralized systems enable opportunities for bad parties, one cannot even imagine in the world behind the computer, and yet, we all believe in them.

When legitimate companies decide to collaborate with one of the ~1500 crypto-projects out there, it’s a good sign that things are going in the right direction, but to be honest: most of these companies are still learning about distributed ledgers, so they are merely a positive indicator for the answer of the question: is my money safe?

There are too many cases when these collaborations ended in a fiasco and the devs ran away with the funds. Since bleeding edge tech isn’t audited, and mostly unregulated, we have no bulletproof insurance that the persons involved are good-hearted and acting in the name of progression.

You’re on tangleblog.com, and I write about IOTA like I perceive it, so naturally, things are drawn in a positive way here.

The reason is simple: I believed in the vision before I invested, and now I give them my full support -which, of course, means nothing to smart investors from outside.

Due diligence is the most valuable currency of traders and investors, and also for companies that decide to give IOTA a chance.

The last weeks, however, have shown that there is nothing to fear and that I obviously backed on the right horse. What a year!

Time to sum up the latest evidence that IOTA is a legitimate project, that has the potential to change everything.

IOTA works differently as blockchains in my regards, it’s just a matter of customer habits, that a lot of people doubt the technology, they don’t know, yet.

Therefore, I’d like to sum up a few spicy questions, that have been going around for quite some time.

What about the alleged cryptographic vulnerability in the IOTA signing algorithm, the “MIT”-scientists wrote about?
–

I heard negative things about the coordinator, what is it?
–

What about the incentive to run a full node? Does the network find enough supporters?
–

Is IOTA truly free to use?
–

What about the bad usability of the wallet?
–

Why is IOTA still not listed on Bittrex, Poloniex, and Kraken?
–

There are reports that people have been hacked. What about that?
–

I waited 20 hours to get a withdrawal from an exchange? Is this IOTA?
–

If companies and projects don’t need tokens for data-transfer, how does the token gain value?

1. What about the alleged cryptographic vulnerability in the IOTA signing algorithm, the “MIT” -scientists wrote about.

What a great show! The headline on Forbes and several other magazines alone were incredibly catchy and held back countless companies and investments -that’s for sure.

That the alleged vulnerability wasn’t in effect, that no funds were ever at risk, that the testing conditions were ludicrous, and that everyone involved acted with a conflict of interest, wasn’t part of that article by Amy Castor.

The not so responsible “responsible disclosure” was lead by Neha Narula of the MIT Media Lab. I’ve received several direct messages from Harvard and the MIT since then, that my research was accurate.

As for the future: The IOTA foundation decided to hire independent professionals (www.cybercrypt.dk), to work on the mentioned signing algorithm, in order to legitimize their efforts and to develop a working and smart solution.

Please read the blog-post of IOTA to understand how serious the efforts of the IOTA foundation are.

The coordinator is training wheels for the juvenile network and has solely the task to set milestones as a Sybil-attack resistance, nothing else. Also, if people want to code referencing nodes themselves, they can do it, because the knowledge is out there, but people just did not do it yet, hence the importance of the security measure “coordinator”.

Needless to say: the foundation, which is officially registered in Germany as a non-profit organization, under German law, will not exploit it. They would stop their complete venture, which makes zero sense.

Luckily, we humans, sometimes, have a brain and can handle imperfect situations for the greater good.
So here is my personal opinion as someone that is part of the IOTA community for a long time:
I do trust these peoples, I know them for 2 years, they are nothing but progressive and eager, so I’d rather chose them over a world, where people just try to exploit everything they can. Including temporary solutions that aim for security.
Because it is necessary.
In a few months, when the hash power is big enough, the training wheels can be taken away step by step and the bad actors cannot attack the network with a Sybil-attack anymore.
That is a trade I’m willing to make, as someone that doesn’t like an inefficient Bitcoin et. al., that doesn’t like the waste of mining electricity and the hypocrisy of the whole cryptoland, because what matters is innovation and not a useless buzzword a la “decentralization” that won’t matter soon.

3. What is the incentive to run a full node? Does the network find enough supporters?

It’s been a while since I wrote my article about the incentives. Many things have happened until then.

The number of full-nodes has been steadily increased and estimates say we are at approx. 5000 but there is yet no way to pinpoint the number.

With the help of Zoran and the audience of my Sonntagsplausch and Sunday banter, we managed to add an additional number of ~400 full nodes to the existing base.

The people obviously believe in the technology and are willing to spend their time and money on it, even without compensation.

We know that several cities and companies research the tangle for their business models.

Cities like Taipei, Tokio or Haarlem are creating clusters in the Tangle network, that rely on several hundred full nodes, which are added to the high number very soon.

We heart that argument very often: IOTA cannot work, there is no incentive.

They were wrong!

4. Is IOTA truly free to use?

That is a matter of taste.

In terms of transaction fees, yes. IOTA has no transaction fees. You send one cent from Japan, the guy in Brazil gets one cent.

However, you need to keep in mind that there must be a spam mechanism to prevent malicious parties from flooding the network.

Therefore a low proof of work algorithm has been added as an anti-Sybil-mechanism.

That is a countermeasure because a system like IOTA will always be targeted in order to try a double-spending attack.

There is practically no way to perform such an attack successfully, but that doesn’t stop some antagonists to attack the network anyway.

Mostly in order to slow down public nodes to make it look like IOTA wouldn’t work. That is a side effect of using the light-node system: you have to rely on your light node provider.

A full node has a way better user experience.

To conclude: IOTA is free to use, but the proof of work is necessary to protect the funds. There are no fees other than tiny amounts of electricity.

Compared to Bitcoin as the one cryptocurrency which is known the most, you had to pay ~$15 or more to send your amount.

Try to send 15 times one cent from your position to Brazil and compare the added transaction fees from Bitcoin and the electrical costs of IOTA’s marginal PoW.

$225 vs 0.0001 cents for electricity.

IOTA is as free as it gets.

5. What about the bad usability of the wallet?

Before I get into that, I want to point out IOTA’s take on that, that has been repeated numerous times.

IOTA is made for the machine economy. Since competition and time are issues that are taken very seriously, the focus of the limited resources of the IOTA foundation lays, therefore, in creating a protocol, the research of the technology, collaborations, and simulations.

Take a look around and compare IOTA with other projects that have a different approach: Byteball, Raiblocks(Nano), Pascalcoin.

The usability is higher in all of them, but they lack research, collaborations, simulations and a clear vision of how and where they want to solve problems. One of them received help from IOTA co-founder Sergey Ivancheglo because he found flaws in their system and helped them to correct the issues. Responsible disclosure done right – no FUD, no malice.

IOTA lacks usability and an easy to use wallet because they focused on getting Bosch, Volkswagen, Fujitsu on board. The list of collaborations and business connections is already too long to list them in one article, but it’s hard to deny that IOTA chose the way of success and adoption.

The Trinity wallet of the University College London around Dr. Navin Ramachandran, Charly Varley and a few other developers is the solution for the usability issues people communicated.

It will include an automated re-attach functionality, an address-re-use protection, a secure seed generator, and better UI. Critical issues that are problems of the Wallet that is in use right now.

This will take a few weeks, but from then on other projects have no advantage in terms of usability anymore.

Investments in the cryptocurrency sphere are often directly connected to the expectation value of an asset.

If the usability of IOTA is improved vastly, what do you expect?

6. Why is IOTA still not listed on Bittrex, Poloniex, and Kraken?

There are 5 reasons.

Cryptoland has seen a tsunami of new registrations, ERC20 tokens, ICO’s, DDoS attacks.
Exchanges need to compensate for all of that. Nothing is ensured or given, this is an ecosystem in development.
–

IOTA is not easy to implement and maintain. The IOTA foundation develops the IXI, a library that makes it easier to implement IOTA on exchanges.
The special abilities of IOTA need special treatment, therefore, we still see just a handful exchanges. Still. Bitfinex, Coinone, Binance, and Okex are not bad when we think about the circumstances.
–

The focus of the Foundation on collaborations, adoption, research etc.
–

The mentioned exchanges are regulated especially the US-based companies. Adding new cryptocurrencies is not easy under the new regulations.
–

There are other, more important markets than cryptocurrency exchanges. The IOTA foundation lately talked about the possibility of adding IOTA to the stock market. This would mean that IOTA had access to regulated, legit funds, companies and traders all over the world. A very helpful company in that regard is the Advanced Blockchain AG in Germany.

7. There are reports, that people have been hacked. What’s that about?

That is a misconception that has been created by the yellow press and blogging landscape of cryptoland.

IOTA has never been hacked. Seeds cannot just randomly be found. The possible combinations of seeds in the IOTA Tangle are higher than all atoms in the observable universe. This is not just a phrase, it’s a fact.

If people lose their money, it’s mostly because they used a rigged online seed generator, or they gave someone access to their seed in other ways.

As long as only you know your seed, and no one has access to it, your funds are 100% save.

8. I waited 20 hours to get a withdrawal from an exchange? Is this IOTA?

No. That’s a combination of 3 things. Your expectation, IOTA’s usability, and that exchanges are struggling to handle the insane numbers of requests by their user-base.

IOTA is pretty young, special, focused on corporal adoption. You shouldn’t expect it to be like consumer software with steady support and service.

The usability makes it look like IOTA is slow and broken, the truth is that if you know the appropriate solutions to issues, it almost always works, depending if the network is working as intended or not.

Attacks, snapshots, and improvements forced the developers numerous times to halt the coordinator or to upgrade the full nodes. That will improve vastly in the future, as the growing network ensure that the coordinator will be removed eventually and snapshots will be performed locally.

Exchanges will handle IOTAs deposits and withdrawals way better in the near future, as the IXI hub is in its final stages of development.

All 3 reasons considered, IOTA has a bright future in terms of user experience.

9. If companies and projects don’t need tokens for using the tangle, how does the token gain value?

A question that has been asked many times lately.

Remember that IOTA has basically 2 functionalities:

a) send data

b) send values

When companies use the IOTA data marketplace for selling their sensor-output, they use both functions as they offer their data and on the other hand, demand just a few iotas for each data-package.

How would they get paid, if the costs of the information are at a fraction of a cent? With a credit card or PayPal?

“We believe that the economy works best when it works for everyone, and this new platform is an engine for inclusion” Don Tapscott, ‎Alex Tapscott in Blockchain Revolution

The majority of active members in Cryptoland share this vision, one way or another. It’s quite rare to see that people are in complete agreement, in unison, when it comes to innovation and possible prospects of a technology.

It seems like the field of Blockchains is such a rare case.

8 years ago, 2009, when Satoshi uploaded his whitepaper for the Bitcoin, nobody knew what a Blockchain is.

Bitcoin? Isn’t that this weird Internet money? A way to buy drugs, anonymity, emancipation, a way past the banks. Who knows.

The last years have shown, that these decentralized peer to peer systems can be helpful in many regards.

We can share information, values or we can make contracts, and no one needs to rely on the authenticity of a signature, made by the contractors, bank employees or whoever is part of the deal.

We also can become millionaires in a blink of an eye.

The Blockchain seems to be an overwhelmingly potential thing, and people start to realize that this piece of technology is here to stay.

We all had this moment when we met old friends and we talked about our career, hobbies, what are you doing right now?

“Blockchains”

At this point, we do not explain all 1471 cryptocurrencies. We also don’t explain proof of stake, BIP148, hashes, or scalability. But we boil it down to: “a great new technology, that could be beneficial for all of us“.

Yes -eventually, Blockchains or distributed ledger technologies (DLT) will shape the technological landscape of the future for the better.

Over the last years, the great vision of blockchains was dyed in humanity.

You can easily check for yourself: go to Twitter and look for #bitcoin , #ethereum or #iota and read the first 20 tweets.

It seems like reality in social media channels doesn’t reflect the great vision of a future, built on blockchains, that we all believe in.

Bitcoin is great, who needs Ethereum?

IOTA is a scam, fuck those altcoins!

If I were you, I would invest in Pumpcoin, you heard it here first.

The homo oeconomicus dominates the majority of communication of Blockchains. We do believe in Blockchains, as long as it is our Blockchain, we invested in.

What hypocrisy.

The reason isn’t really mindblowing.

People know that the cryptocurrency-tsunami of investments will be a stepstone for a new generation of millionaires, and they also believe that the more they communicate and advertise, the higher the chances are that they are surfing straight into the six and seven digit Dollar club.

That, of course, doesn’t tell us anything about the technological perks, the technical quality of the system they are cheering for.

We can replace all those tweets, texts and messages with “Buy ***coin, make me rich, please”.

That works in 99% of all cases. At this point, I recommend you go to Twitter and look for #bitcoin: Link.

And there are millions a day. Cryptocurrency/Blockchains have become “the game of pump“.

The incentive of earning money is way higher than supporting the technology itself.

That leads to the neverending brigading, FUD’ing and lying, regardless of the truth.

It also leads to forks, mining conglomerates, and divided communities.

People create useless forks, they create special vocabulary that sounds meaningful, or they write long, technical blog posts where they compare the old system with their new, better Blockchain with a fancy logo or a quote of a renowned person, that vouches for the upcoming initial coin offering (ICO).

People collect hundreds of millions of Dollars, for a 5 head developer-team.

The innovation, luckily, doesn’t take place in social media channels and is not equivalent to the initial amount of investments. It happens behind closed curtains because partnerships are behind NDA’s, in most cases.

If you invest in Blockchains, invest in the technology, the team, the prospects and the advantages it has over others, despite what social media writes on a Thursday in November.

If you follow social media channels, you may take short-term gains, that are based on emotional market-reactions, but the best strategy is looking for the best tech, your favorized project and to hold onto it. For years, if necessary.

This is not a cheerful article for IOTA, this is just a reminder, that we should not lose the aim for all of this. This is greater than our purse, so let’s not reduce it to a Kardashian’esque reality soap.

Needless to say, I’m looking forward to times, when exchanges, ICO’s and crypto-industries are regulated by governments. Yes. Governments. They are here to stay anyway. Maybe for taking part in the technical and neutral maintenances of these systems, while they provide 10% of the hashpower for earning parts of the currency.

A self-sustaining task, that would fit the government while people and companies could use these distributed systems for their purposes. Just an idea of a solution for a disrupting innovation. Same could work with banks. They couldn’t stop the network, but they could become a useful part of it.

We need to accept banks and governments because unregulated systems lead to game-theoretical circle jerking, where everyone works for himself.

Why? Because the image of Satoshi’s vision implied improvement of life, emancipation for the people, we either believe in it, or we reduce that to a flowery phrase that fits right into the buzzword banter of investors.

He didn’t want to create a playground for ludicrous investors, cryptocurrency casino web pages, pump & dump groups or emotional discussions on Reddit, that are solely aiming for changing the sentiment of a cryptocurrency.

What we need is an education for our future. A solid comprehension for the possibilities of cryptocurrencies, not investment wise.

Bitcoin is already used in countless countries. The value of a BTC is over $7000, as I’m writing. Is the value of one bitcoin important? Not for the innovation.

Apart from the price that holds investors captive, Bitcoin is used as a standard currency already. Over 330 ATM all over the world make it possible to use Bitcoin in people lifes on a daily basis.

Currencies are one field, technological advances for the producing industry is another.

These technologies are not just objects of an investment game, they are part of a paradigm shift on a global scale.

Foxconn already communicated that ~300.000 of their 400.000 workers are replaced by machines in the near future. Distributed ledger technologies are on the verge of being used everywhere.

The World Economy Forum in Davos hosted presentations and discussions for over 2500 managers, thought leaders and scientists.

They debated about networking, big data, robotics, automation, artificial intelligence and the Internet Of Things. Better known as Industry 4.0.

Ask any company, bank, government for the importance and disruptive impact magnitude of distributed ledger technologies. They already know that for years.

The Deutsche Bank released parts of an internal study with an intimidating result: For the first time in industrial times, an industrial revolution will destroy workplaces instead of creating them.

A heavy transformation for industry and society.

We don’t need Tradingview, bots for margin trading, or hashtags with edgy love-declarations for a coin.

We need solutions, to integrate these systems in the financial and industrial infrastructures, to embrace the coming century.

This enabler tech could bring basic wealth for every region on the globe, it could transform the energy sector, revolutionize the sharing or exchanging of value, it could enable a new, stable form of democracy and shift our society from a purely antagonistic, hedonistic, to a thriving, thinking, sustainable society.

We are taking part in interesting times that possibly change the way we live and work on a global scale, forever.

We should accept them as such and use innovation to make it happen, in the best way possible, instead of advertising innovation towards our own pockets.

The IoT

With the latest development in this interconnected world, new markets are emerging and a variety of requirements are born.

Wearables, smartphones, domestic devices like smart-home solutions for an intelligent household demand an interconnectivity solution that has yet to come.

It’s no secret that almost every company is also working on solutions to make it happen: a world, where data is a more valuable resource than oil. If not today, then in the near future.

This leads to a point, where technical barriers of today hinder progress for tomorrow.

The IoT, a distributed network around the world is more than the Internet.

A mesh-net that is connected with every possible connection type. Where devices work in local clusters, it’s obvious that centralized components, sometimes on a different continent, don’t fit in the greater picture.

Sensors, cameras, smart devices often use ad-hoc solutions to function in their specific field, such as monitoring systems like Scada, that send valuable data to a nearby control center in order to optimize industrial processes.

What if these monitoring systems are working time-sensitive, but the current solutions are slow and on top of that centralized and unsecured. The productivity could be better, employees may work in a more dangerous environment and as a result: the company could face problems.

Connected facilities incentivize industry-espionage and hacks.

Distributed denial of service attacks is a phenomenon of the last few years, where certain malicious parties are attacking infrastructural points in the web, to cripple communication of some systems and special services.

Sometimes as a decoy for a hack, sometimes for political or activist-reasons.

Not rarely, mentionable down times create financial losses or the blockage of regional infrastructure’s hits, next to the target, also other companies that are located in the surrounding area.

A problem of the Internet, not necessarily of the IoT.

Due to the distributed mesh-net characteristics, the IoT is envisioned as a network, that is self-sufficient, in which case it can connect devices of the identification group via many ways, not only one.

An attack on central points is per definition impossible because there is no center in the IoT.

That leads to a natural resistance against DDoS and other downtimes.

Legacy systems vs. new systems

An additional issue of cloud-computing in the IoT would be the costs. Legacy system use to ignore huge amounts of data because there is neither storage no need for them.

New systems in the IoT, with smart solutions, rely on this data, but sending them into the cloud would go beyond the scope of the IoT. Too much information is generated, and real-time analysis, as well as centralized cloud-computing solutions, are conflictive with each other as uploading these huge amounts takes time and money -especially if the cloud-storage is thousands of miles away.

Fog computing, however, creates a bridge-solution for the identification group and computation group: It is about forwarding the computational power to the edge of the network, where data is generated and the results are needed.

The benefits of using Fog computing instead of legacy cloud systems are tremendous.

Varghese, Wang, et. al [2017]. come to the conclusion that. “For an online game use-case, we found that the average response time for a user is improved by 20% when using the edge of the network in comparison to using a cloud-only model. It was also observed that the volume of traffic between the edge and the cloud server is reduced by over 90% for the use-case.”

This is just one use case that can be mirrored on many other settings.

In consumer markets, Quality of Service and Quality of Experience are important factors.

Another example would be the transparent customer. When a transparent customer enters a big supermarket, his views and interests could be analyzed within seconds.

Cameras can detect his interest in certain devices or components, and advertisements on monitors along his path can be adjusted to his specific needs. With old legacy systems impossible due to the long processing times between these cameras, a cloud, and computational resources, with fog computing, however, the data can be processed way faster and deliver the necessary information back to the customer, along his way in the mall.

To draw a simplified picture of the fog-landscape:

The distributed mesh-net is growing in height z, if you will, whereas decentralized and centralized networks are growing on the x and y axis. Shorter ways from the data collectors to the computational resources are the result of fog-computing.

Concerns can be addressed with IOTA

Whether it’s the data-integrity, optimization or protection of the in-house Research & Development data, companies look for a lasting solution.

When data is stored centralized, hackers usually use social engineering, or phishing attacks to get access to the data.

As centrally stored data would be collected all in once with this method, Fog computing would make it possible to store sensitive information in small packets, distributed, with different passwords/keys/seeds to access them.

IOTA can deliver a unique solution here. A data-stream, bound to countless seeds, in a distributed network, secured with sophisticated algorithms. Not even quantum computing would be a threat to the hashes.

As you may already know, IOTA is a distributed ledger technology, that enables fee free transactions.

For data-transfer with fog-computing, you wouldn’t even need tokens, the only condition would be to confirm two other transactions before sending one of your own.

A rule that enables true scalability for a billion device network on a global scale.

With Masked Authenticated Messaging, IOTA has an additional option to send and process sensitive data.

Now, a really big hurdle in the IoT is the availability of dozens of connections and different norms.

When devices could be connected in a similar way, the usability would increase. A plethora of standards that are built for the IoT can lead to a fragmentation of the network, as companies want to stick to their standards, to support their product-line or roadmap.

If IOTA would be the standard settlement and data layer, which is free to use, the Internet of Things could be a barrier-less environment with true scalability and data-integrity.

Due to the value of collected data, new markets would come up, that aim for selling this information in real-time.

People would possibly be able to sell their consumer data, each time they enter a shop, with true nano payments.

If data would be collected in the fog, BigChain DB a scalable distributed database for all kinds of data could deliver the necessary infrastructure for customers, institutes, and companies.

A seamless solution for the IoT.

Fog computing is, therefore, the next necessary milestone in the field of the Internet of Everything and a vital part of the vision of IOTA.

What we already know is incredible, but there are some connections we don’t know yet, and considering what the IOTA foundation already has accomplished, I can only assume that this is just a fraction of what’s behind the curtains.

I, therefore, do not guarantee that this list is complete or that it’s reflecting the reality.

This list only shows revealed business connections and is not officially approved by anyone.

@TechCrunch Would love that for the cryptospace, together with a standard they had to accept like using primary sources, commentaries have to be marked as such and conflicts of interests should be marked at the beginning of an article. Crypto desperately needs a standard. #iota #btc #eth